I agree. Besides the spying, the big issue I have with infotainment systems is, let’s call it, lifespan incompatibility.

Cars routinely last decades. Ideally, they would last forever. Once you strip away the bells and whistles, a car is a simple utilitarian object meant to accomplish a universally necessary task - the movement of people and cargo from one place to another. People dealt with the transport problem a thousand years ago, and they’ll be dealing with it a thousand years from now. There will always be need for a box on wheels that can move large amounts of things around quickly. Critically, a car can be a reasonably independent device - it doesn’t need to interface with some outside network in order to function. Yes, modern vehicles do often phone home, but that isn’t necessary to fulfill the vehicle’s core function. There are people living in 2026 still driving around Ford Model T’s. Sure, cars need roads and gasoline or electricity, but the same electricity can charge an EV from today or an EV from a century ago. When the Saturn car company went under, its passing didn’t brick all the Saturns on the roads.

Consumer electronics are the opposite. They’re built knowing that they’ll be obsolete relics in just a few years. The tech moves quickly and people want the newest features. People who change their phones even just every 5 years are considered frugal. Devices like smart phones also exist deeply embedded in vast tech ecosystems. My phone needs to be able to work with countless other sites, services, and apps. As their protocols and languages change, the phone must keep up. If my phone can’t talk to all the computers in the cloud, it can’t do its most basic functions. A 20 year old phone would be pretty useless in 2026. I would doubt you could even get a carrier to sell you a plan for it.

Consumer electronics and cars are fundamentally different types of objects. Assuming it was properly preserved, a person from 2126 could get real every day utility out of a car from 2026. But a 2026 phone, even if it was miraculously functional, would be a paperweight, of no use to them at all beyond a historical artifact. Cars fulfill a universal and timeless need. They should be designed to be bullet proof. Phones are born with their days numbered. Consumer electronics are meant to be a thing of the moment, constantly evolving, constantly changing. There’s no need to build in extreme durability. (I would prefer phones that can be repaired, but I’m not going to use even a highly repairable phone for 30 years.)

And this is the problem with permanently embedding consumer electronics into cars. They fundamentally exist on different time horizons. Inevitably the infotainment part of the car ends up a junk relic while the car part of the car still has years of good life left in it.